When I first noticed it happening, I started sending PMs to Glistam pointing them out. After two or three of those I realized it was just one of those continual things he had to get around to once a week or so.

I've noticed some sites now require you to transcribe a picture of letters and numbers into an extra field when you apply for membership. That would kill the automatic spammers._________________"Morals are customs rather than natural law." --Robert A. Heinlein

This board does that upon registration, but it seems to have stopped working. I'm going to try and update the board to the latest version of php and see if that helps._________________"I don't have dreams about the Navy. The Navy killed all of my dreams." - Buddy Lee

That's called captchka. When I started a registration the other day it presented the image. When you say "doesnt work", what do you mean?_________________You are the result of 4 billion years of evolutionary success.

Fucking act like it.

"The stars died so that you could be here today" - Lawrence Krauss

"The universe is huge and old, and rare things happen all the time." - Lawrence Krauss

I guess what I meant was that our board does do that, yet we seem to get tons of spammers anyway. A lot of them look the same, so they appear to me to be bots, but maybe they're just very repititious humans._________________"I don't have dreams about the Navy. The Navy killed all of my dreams." - Buddy Lee

I noticed that the captcha (I spelled it wrong before - damn my memory) images were not very obscured. Meaning that they aren't very distorted and there isn't a lot of noise in the image to confuse a machine.

It's definitely possible to write software to analyze such images and generate the proper string.

I was hoping there was something strong enough to resolve the problem, but it looks like they're all breakable enough to be a problem. You might considered trying to implement something stronger, like gimpy (not ez-gimpy). I tried to find a link to a php module for gimpy, but I wasn't able to. I wasn't able to find any implementation at all, which means I just haven't looked in the right places.

You might spend a lot of time implementing something different only to have it not be effective.

Still, I've got to think that there are a lot of these phpBB boards out there, and there are a lot of spammers who are attacking the base model so to speak. Even small improvements might take your board off the radar, particularly if it was something custom.

I'm assuming here that you manually pre-approve all of the entries. Is that the case? If so, the addition of a new, required field might help you personally filter out the bots. You could ask them to describe how they found the board or why they want to join.

It wouldn't be hard to automate such a thing of course, but if we zig when everyone else zags, the spammers are unlikely to write special code for us.

Just an idea. If you need help with this I'd be willing to fiddle with it._________________You are the result of 4 billion years of evolutionary success.

Fucking act like it.

"The stars died so that you could be here today" - Lawrence Krauss

"The universe is huge and old, and rare things happen all the time." - Lawrence Krauss

I manually approve all accounts. It's a hassle, but it gets rid of so many spam accounts it's incredible. Nine times out of ten I can tell an account is a spam account because of the web page they link. If it seems shady, or advertises free drugs or music that's a huge spammer flag. Also they will tend ot put similar things in their signature. Or thy're just putting crazy stuff like thier location is "free sex" and their sig is "horney girls" or all those fields might be filled otu with "forex." There are a lot of different things I look at.

I try not to do it too fast that I delete a real account from someone who actually wants to be a real board member. Usually a real person interested in joining has talked to one of their friends from the board and let them know, in which case I'll get a PM warning me that so-an-so is their friend and I should accept their account._________________"I don't have dreams about the Navy. The Navy killed all of my dreams." - Buddy Lee

Glistam, has your little rank hierarchy been changed so that Spammer? is the title for all people with zero posts, or is that your filter at work?_________________"Morals are customs rather than natural law." --Robert A. Heinlein

That's the default 0-post, new to the boards title. That's why there's a "?" at the end of it, because just having a 0 post count doesn't necessarily mean they're a spammer. It's just likely.

On a side note, I changed the name filters a bit and it seems to have helped cut out a lot of the spam accounts. Now we only get one or two every few days instead of 5+ every day._________________"I don't have dreams about the Navy. The Navy killed all of my dreams." - Buddy Lee

Can we get a /spoiler tag feature?
Basically it just sets the text the same color as the blue background so you have to highlight the text to see it._________________"Fuckin' Amesome" --- Joe Flacco
"I love watching special effects on my iPad." ---Howard Stern

What's the context? Are you talking about the fact that the Wii can be hacked, or are you providing descriptions of how to hack the Wii? Because the first is always allowed, but we'd prefer that stuff like the second don't appear on our boards, unless possibly it also includes details to prevent that from happening._________________"I don't have dreams about the Navy. The Navy killed all of my dreams." - Buddy Lee

I say "FEH" to RSS._________________We live in an amazing, amazing world, and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots. -- Louis CK

We are going to have to stick a pin in a map, set fire to something and carry on until the earth looks flat! -- RandyMac

I could teach you to how file a washer to make it worth a nickel but if you really want to make big bucks just take a penny and drill a hole in it and it becomes a washer and is worth a dime. -- Art Martin, Old-Time Logger